Looking back over the forty-year discussion about film melodrama, we can now claim that certain fundamental theoretical approaches have become established. One of these is that hardly anyone would still make an attempt to define melodrama as a specific genre to which we could then taxonomically assign a certain group of films. Rather, as Christine Gledhill writes, melodrama designates a “culturally conditioned mode of perception and aesthetic circulation,” which has historically unfolded as a “genre-producing machine.” The melodramatic is a fundamental mode of entertainment cinema, even of entertainment culture, which can structure the widest variety of genre types. Indeed we can accept the thesis, if not without reservations, that melodrama – as fits the historical usage of the word – ultimately designates all forms of sensation-oriented entertainment culture.

The idea of the melodramatic mode corresponds to a genre-theoretical concept in which genre cinema itself is understood as a system paradigmatically formulated in the interplay between various aesthetic modalities. In this system, the melodramatic mode is surely one of the base aesthetic modalities that can indeed be sufficiently differentiated from others, themselves perhaps just as fundamental: for instance, comedy, horror, action or the thriller. I myself, in reference to this (incomplete) list of the aesthetic modalities of genre cinema, have attempted to define the melodramatic as sentimental enjoyment. The following is in no way meant as a recap of this discussion. Rather, I would like (a) to pursue a motif where the melodramatic modus can clearly be set apart as a sentimental modality in relation to other modalities: namely, the motif of the victim. The melodramatic image of suffering is marked both historically and systematically by the almost programmatic opposition between the passive suffering of sentient subjects and the heroic acts of dramatic heroes, presented as a dramatic spectacle. Furthermore, I would like (b) to look into this melodramatic image of suffering in a specific genre in which we do expect to find the representation of victimhood, but not necessarily in the variety seen in melodrama: namely, in the Hollywood war movie. The thesis is that this genre is intrinsically marked by the melodramatic mode.